BUSINESS took me to Dublin the other day, but it wasn’t very hectic business so I ended up with some spare time to watch brent geese grazing on the pitches of the GAA Club in Sandymount.
There’s nothing unusual about this. I’ve often watched brent geese on various grassy areas around Dublin Bay. But when you give it closer attention it really is a bit strange. Wild birds don’t get much wilder than the brent goose, a creature born and bred in Arctic Canada. And here they are, spending part of the winter in the middle of our capital city.
It’s interesting how some birds move from the country to the city and some do the opposite — or, at least, it’s interesting to me.
Take the rook, for example. When I was a kid rooks were birds of the countryside, and you almost never saw them in an urban situation unless it was a very large city park. But today I went down to my local village and two of them were perched on the rim of a litter bin outside the chipper. Then I drove on to my local town and when I stopped in a filling station there were six of them hanging around the forecourt. These were street-wise birds.
I have a theory about what happened. In the winter rooks often form mixed flocks with jackdaws. Jackdaws learnt the advantages of urban living a long time ago. I can’t tell you exactly how long ago, but from literary references I know that they certainly lived in cities in Elizabethan times, and probably throughout the Middle Ages.
Some time in the second half of the 20th century jackdaws taught rooks in a mixed winter flock about the food supplies and micro-climate available in urban areas and rook behaviour changed.
Now take the example of house sparrows. The belief is they arrived in Ireland with the first Neolithic farmers five or six thousand years ago. They have remained very dependent on human beings and, up until recently, were just about the ultimate urban bird. But in Ireland and all over Europe a catastrophic decline has been noticed in the numbers of house sparrows in urban areas in recent decades.
But I live in a very rural area and I have noticed an increase in the number of house sparrows — 25 years ago there were none here. Today they are one of the most frequent visitors to my bird table.
Have they moved in the other direction, from the city to the country, and if so what is causing this? One possible reason could be declining numbers of livestock in urban areas. Fifteen years ago my lifestyle involved spending quite a lot of time standing on the platform of Sydney Parade station waiting for the Dart. This station serves parts of Donnybrook, Ballsbridge and Sandymount, the poshest bits of Dublin. But standing on the platform I would listen to the crowing of roosters and the cackling of hens from behind a fence.
I think house sparrows have reacted to this change and moved back to the countryside. And I think that several other bird species are changing their behaviour in response to changes in human behaviour. If you’ve noticed anything similar I’d be interested to hear.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, February 18, 2008
